Max Boot: Out, Damn Spot

Washington Post columnist and infamous Iraq War pimp, Max Boot. would very much like everyone to stop calling neocons "neocons":

It’s time to retire the ‘neocon’ label

Cool with me.  I'd be happy to go with "lying, blood-drunk war-pimping scum" if he'd prefer, although it doesn't quite roll off the tongue as easily.  And before continuing, I want to make it clear that I realize that since Max Boot called Trump a shithead, by admonishing Mr. Boot as a weaselly self-serving fraud, I stand in violation of the "Never Trumper Get Out Of Accountability Free" compact which apparently everyone at MSNBC and most other prominent Liberal media persons signed.

As you know, the terms of the  "Never Trumper Get Out Of Accountability Free" compact are quite clear: once a Republican or a Conservative (or a True Conservative or an Independent "Conservative" or a Conservitarian or whatever the fuck they're calling themselves today) call Donald Trump a shithead, they are automatically exempt from all criticism, absolved of all previous despicable behavior, and are to be spared any inconvenient questions about their past actions or their future plans.  Once they have uttered the shibboleth, "Never Trumpers" cease to exist in any historical continuum at all -- they just float in an infinite, endless Now, collecting book deals and paid teevee gigs.

However, in my defense, I would argue that since it was Max Boot himself who violated the terms of the "Never Trumper Get Out Of Accountability Free" by breaching the perimeter of his pocket universe of consequence-free eternal Now-ness and re-enter the stream of history in a truly asinine attempt to re-litigate George Bush's Iraqi Clusterfuck, that he is no longer under the compact's protection and therefor a legitimate target.

The irony here is that it is precisely because lying, blood-drunk war-pimping scum like Max Boot were so successful at helping the Bush Administration lie us into the wrong war (and bulldozing the same, lazy Beltway media that now employs Max Boot) that Mr. Boot would now very much like to re-imagine the entire Iraq Clusterfuck as a collective mistake for which, y'know, everyone was to blame:

In fact, 72 percentof the public supported the decision to go to war — including commentators like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald who now hysterically decry “professional war peddlers.” By trying to blame the conflict on a coterie of “neocons,” critics of the Iraq War are absolving everyone else — including, in some cases, themselves — of responsibility for a horrendous collective mistake.

Furthermore, by falling back on the neocon's favorite doctrine --

In November, 2001, Suskind writes, Vice-President Dick Cheney announced that if there was “a one percent chance” that a threat was real “we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.” 

-- Max Boot manages in the same sentence to pivot effortlessly from admitting that the word "neocon" is not an anti-Semitic smear --

I am by no means suggesting that everyone who uses the neocon label is doing so as an anti-Semitic smear...

-- to arguing that the word "neocon" should be banished anyway because some small percentage of people somewhere might use it that way:

...but the word has been used often enough in that ugly context that it should make any person of goodwill think twice before employing it. 

Sorry, Max, you fuckers used up all my goodwill a long, long time ago.  But I really can't blame you for trying.  After all, once it was clear how many credulous and well-connected Liberals in the media were goofy enough to let you Never Trumpers slide on everything else, why not give "Rewriting The History of the Iraq War" a shot too?

By the way, for those of you keeping score at home, as I may have mentioned once or twice over the past 14 years, erasing, deflecting, dissipating and generally absolving Republican atrocities with a steady barrage of Bothsiderism has always been the goal of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It.

Or, as a better writer than any of us will ever be once put it:

What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?

Behold, a Tip Jar!